Walter Brueggemann QUOTES

121 " New Song When the new king rules, it is new song time (Isa 42:10). It has always been new song time when the new king arrives and there is no more calling of the skilled mourners who know how to cry on call. The funeral is ended, for now it is festival time. It is time for the children and for all who can sing new songs and discern new situations. The old songs had to be sung in the presence of mockers (Ps 137:3). And they were an embarrassment because they spoke about all that had failed. But new song time is a way to sing a new social reality as the freedom songs stood behind every freedom act. The energy comes from the song that will sing Yahweh to his throne and Babylon to her grave. As Abraham Heschel has seen, only people in covenant can sing. New song time is when a new covenant inaugurates a new mode of reality. "

― Walter Brueggemann , The Prophetic Imagination

123 " Jeremiah is frequently misunderstood as a doomsday spokesman or a pitiful man who had a grudge and sat around crying; but his public and personal grief was for another reason and served another purpose. Jeremiah embodies the alternative consciousness of Moses in the face of the denying king.9 He grieves the grief of Judah because he knows what the king refuses to know. "

― Walter Brueggemann , The Prophetic Imagination

125 " Hans Walter Wolff has suggested that the Sabbath is the great equalizer, for that day is a foretaste of the kingdom when all-great and small-are reckoned to be exactly equal .2' All-masters and slaves-are to engage in this most godlike activity of being at peace. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

127 " As every vibrant subcommunity knows, the defining prerequisite for such a subcommunity is a conviction that it can and will be different because of the purposes of God that will not relent. "

― Walter Brueggemann , The Prophetic Imagination

129 " Save us, Lord, from a religion that ignores the cries of the exploited and oppressed. Lead us into a deeper faith that challenges injustice and makes the sacrifices that must be made to build a society that is ever more truly human. Amen. "

― Walter Brueggemann , A Way Other Than Our Own: Devotions for Lent

131 " Luke is especially aware that Jesus’ deeds took place among the marginal victims of society. Mark is more sensitive to the fact that hardness of heart can stop his work, indeed, that where there is no belief he could not energize (Mark 6:5–6). It was possible to resist the new energizing, but there were great numbers who were free to embrace it and had no need to resist. The whole movement is summarized in staggering simplicity: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. (Luke 7:22) And then the response. Of course, those who valued what is old resisted: The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people sought to destroy him. (Luke 19:47) The Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (Mark 3:6) And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” (Mark 3:22) "

― Walter Brueggemann , The Prophetic Imagination

133 " we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Spirituality of the Psalms

135 " My judgment is that such a state of affairs not only is evident in the exile of Judah but is characteristic of most situations of ministry. When we try to face the holding action that defines the sickness, the aging, the marriages, and the jobs of very many people, we find that we have been nurtured away from hope, for it is too scary. Such hope is an enemy of the very royal consciousness with which most of us have secured a working arrangement. The question facing ministry is whether there is anything that can be said, done, or acted in the face of the ideology of hopelessness. "

― Walter Brueggemann , The Prophetic Imagination

137 " There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are "speeched" to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens, "finally comes the poet"-finally. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Finally Comes the Poet

139 " [I]n 1955, Klaus Koch proposed a construct of “deeds-consequences,” wherein he argued that the very structure of most sayings in the Book of Proverbs (and elsewhere in the Old Testament) assumed and affirmed that human deeds have automatic and inescapable consequences, so that acts for good or for ill produce their own “spheres of destiny.” The critical point in Koch’s argument is that in “foolish acts” - acts that violate Yahweh’s righteousness - Yahweh does not need to intervene directly in order to punish or reward, as in the covenant blessings and curses of Sinai. Rather, the deed carries within it the seed of its own consequence, punishment or reward, which is not imposed by an outside agent (Yahweh). Thus, for example, a lazy person suffers the consequence of poverty, without the instrusion of any punishing agent; likewise, carelessness in choosing friends will produce a life of dissolution, all on its own. Consequently, “responsible acts” - those that cohere with Yahweh’s ordering of creation - will result in good for self and for community. Yahweh is not at all visible in this process. But, according to Israel, Yahweh is nonetheless indispensable for the process. This is not, in Israel’s horizon, a self-propelled system of sanctions, but it is an enactment of Yahweh’s sovereign, faithful intentionality. "

― Walter Brueggemann , Theology of The Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy